Muddy Waters Changed Music Forever With His Trip Up the Blues Highway

Sunday

So when the 28-year-old sharecropper heard a white man was looking for him, he was sure it was a government revenuer.

Instead, the white man wanted to bottle something of his own -- the sound of Morganfield's voice and acoustic guitar. It was 1941, and Alan Lomax, who was with the Library of Congress, was in the Mississippi Delta to record the blues.

The black man remained wary of the white man from Washington, D.C., until Lomax sipped water from a shared cup, then doffed his shoes to go barefoot. He also pulled a Martin guitar out of his car.

Then, inside the sharecropper's shack by a huge field of cotton, Lomax recorded the man everyone knew by the nickname "Muddy Water" for the first time.

After cutting one tune, Muddy listened as the visitor played it back for him. Though other field hands always told Muddy he was good, hearing his own wailing voice and slide guitar was nothing short of a revelation.

"Man, I can sing," said Muddy Water (later known as Muddy Waters).

Two years later, the Mississippi bluesman moved to Chicago and proceeded to change the blues -- and popular music -- forever.

One of his songs, "Rollin' Stone," provided the name for one of the world's best-known rock bands, the title of a revered Bob Dylan song and the name of a magazine that has chronicled generations of pop culture.

In the current issue, Rolling Stone magazine lists what it calls the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and the top two bear Muddy Waters' direct influence.

The first is Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone."

The second is a seminal rock song by the Rolling Stones called "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." That song's defiant lament was inspired by Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied." (The Stones even recorded it at Muddy Waters' main studio -- Chess Records in Chicago).

A who's who of important rock acts, including the Stones, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and The Allman Brothers, embraced the Mississippi bluesman and recorded his music, as did others, from the Grateful Dead and The Doors to fellow Mississippi native Elvis Presley.

"Muddy's importance as a defining voice of the latter 20th century in America can't be overstated," said Robert Gordon, author of the 2002 Waters biography, "Can't Be Satisfied."

"His sound was emulated by the Rolling Stones, the Rolling Stones defined rock 'n' roll, and rock 'n' roll became the voice through which the rest of the world came to understand America."

WITHOUT EQUAL

With a voice that could bellow deep hurt as easily as it could fire a yell with a guitar sound that matched, Muddy Waters became the archetype of the blues, an indispensable influence and a model for nearly all who followed.

Those who did say he is without equal -- the greatest bluesman of all.

"I credit him with being the godfather of the blues," says guitarist B.B. King. "Muddy Waters has done more for the blues than anyone else."

"He was the top man," says Johnny Winter, the Texas blues/ rock guitarist who calls Waters his spiritual father and who produced four albums by Waters in the 1970s. "He was the blues. He was just the best."

"He made the blues come alive," says Bo Diddley, whose first recordings were on Chess Records, the same label Muddy recorded for in Chicago. The two musicians engaged in a one-upsmanship of sorts: After Waters released "(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man" in 1954, Bo Diddley responded in 1955 with "I'm A Man." Muddy then took the "I'm a Man" chorus and turned the words into a blistering crowd pleaser called "Mannish Boy."

From 1943 to 1983, Muddy Waters recorded scores of other songs that became classics, including "Rollin' and Tumblin'," "I Just Want to Make Love to You" and "Got My Mojo Working."

His 1962 hit, "You Need Love," would be reworked by Led Zeppelin into "Whole Lotta Love" -- listed 75th on the new Rolling Stone list of greatest songs.

And just as Muddy Waters defined the electric blues, his bands and recordings introduced other blues musicians, including Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Otis Spann, James Cotton, Buddy Guy and many others.

On Dec. 12, 1954 -- 50 years ago today -- one of Muddy's biggest hits, "I'm Ready," culminated a two-month run in the Top 10 of Billboard magazine's R&B chart.

Like other songs that helped make his reputation, "I`m Ready" showed Waters' voice was as bluesy as a smoke-filled Chicago club and as rollicking as the proclamation he lays down.

"I'm ready! As ready as anybody can be," he croons. "I'm ready for you; I hope you're ready for me."

Muddy was indeed ready -- ready for acclaim as the archetypal Mississippi bluesman who put Chicago on the map and ready to further the blues' evolution from an acoustic music in the Delta to an electric one in the North.

And he was poised to become the blues' best-known proponent, which he was before his death in 1983 at age 70.

But Muddy's trajectory all began on a patch of grass outside Clarksdale, Miss., next to the dwarfing field of cotton.

It was there he first made the guitar resonate with a glass bottleneck slide on his finger. There he discovered the powerful charm of his voice. And it was there archivist Lomax made the first recordings of a singer the world would come to know.

MAKING THE BLUES

The area generally called the Mississippi Delta is not at the mouth of the famous river, rather it's an expanse of fertile soil along its banks where four states meet -- Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana.

It is a giant swath of sun-rich earth, perfect for growing cotton and famous for the toll it took on the men, women and children who picked the crop by hand.

This is where the blues evolved -first as field hollers, and then as three-chorded songs of bone-chilling lore. It was the music of muscleknotting sharecropper work, of people picking cotton with sore hands and backs bent like pretzels.

It was the sound of lives steeped in hardship, of souls trapped in poverty. It was the wail of singers like Charlie Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson. And it became the music of Muddy Waters.

The singer was born McKinley Morganfield in a small settlement called Jugs Corner, near Rolling Fork, Miss., near the state's western boundary with Louisiana and Arkansas.

Although music and history references list his birth date as April 4, 1915, Muddy's biographer, Robert Gordon, discovered through Census records and notes from the singer's first recording sessions that he was actually born two years earlier, in 1913.

Muddy's mother, Berta Grant, died from unknown causes soon after her only child was born. His grandmother, Della Grant, took in the young boy and moved with him to the Stovall Plantation.

He was between 6 months and 3 years old when she moved to be near her cousins, Gordon says. Muddy's father, Ollie Morganfield, stayed behind and began another family.

Prone to playing in the rich soil and creekbeds near Jugs Corner, the boy was dubbed "Muddy" by his grandmother.

That was before friends later added "Water" to his name, something he then didn't like, and years before a Chess record label added an "s" to make it "Waters." For the rest of his life, most called him simply "Muddy," though a few called him Mac.

As the boy grew, music swirled around his ears just as the scent of cotton wafted throughout the plantation.

The field hollers of slaves in the 1800s had, by the early 1900s, become songs played on guitars, harmonicas, and "diddley bows," which were made of broom wire nailed taunt to wood and plucked.

Excited by the early "race records" (recordings by black musicians) he heard on hand-cranked phonographs, the young Muddy began playing harmonica at age 10.

At age 17, Muddy sold the last horse he and his grandmother owned for $15 -- using $2.50 of it to buy a second-hand Stella guitar. He learned to use a bottleneck to play slide guitar, just as he had seen Son House and Charlie Patton do when they drifted through to play juke joints and fish fries.

As he grew older, Muddy began performing at such parties, adding to his small wages working as a field hand and brewing moonshine.

Across the Delta, sharecroppers went to juke joints to hear live music or turned their own homes into "juke houses" for parties with music, gambling and moonshine.

Robert Birdsong, a blues historian and guide in Clarksdale, says sharecropper shacks on the Stovall Plantation were painted either green or red for a significant reason.

"If you came onto a farm where all the houses were green and you saw one red one sitting there, that was the juke joint," he says.

A picture of Muddy's shack before it was hit by a tornado shows it was painted a brick red. (The tornado that hit the shack left only the one-room cabin now on display at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale.)

Along with playing his own juke parties and other social gatherings, Muddy performed on the locally famous blues show, "King Biscuit Time," beamed from KFFA in Helena, Ark.

At nearby Friar's Point, a town on the Mississippi River where Muddy caught the ferry to Helena, he once saw Robert Johnson play on the front porch of a drugstore.

Muddy also performed in the town closest to Stovall -- Clarksdale -- a business and social center and home turf of musicians John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner and others. Sam Cooke was born there, and W.C. Handy, who documented early blues styles and composed his own music, lived there in the early 1900s.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Clarksdale was a musical mecca of sorts, boasting a bustling collection of juke joints in its "New World" or black district.

"If you wanted to be a bluesman, this was the place you came to prove you had it," Birdsong says. "If you could make it in the New World, you could make it on Beale Street (in Memphis), St. Louis or Chicago."

Fittingly, one "New World" entrance was across railroad tracks where Highways 61 and 49 then intersected. That is said to be the "Cross Roads" made famous in bluesman Robert Johnson's recording.

While some New World streets -- Yazoo, Issaquena and Fourth Street -- are today lined with boarded-up, pastel-colored storefronts, they once were filled with patrons going to joints like Annie Jones' gambling house, the Red Top Lounge, Messengers Pool Hall and a meeting room that later became the Savoy Theatre.

Puddin' Hatchett, a 73-year-old gambler/former harmonica player who continuously flashes a pair of dice in his hands, says that when he was about 10 he saw Muddy Waters performing in such places.

"We used to go right here to listen to Muddy Waters," he says, pointing to a closed-up building across Fourth Street.

"Everybody loved Muddy Waters."

I CAN DO IT

But without the attention from Lomax, Muddy might never have made it past Clarksdale.

The story is often told that Lomax and John Work, who were collaborating on a project to record indigenous musicians for the Library of Congress and Fisk University, were looking for Robert Johnson (who had died three years earlier) when they stumbled across Stovall Plantation's own blues player.

Actually, the two had been aware of Johnson's death, Gordon says. "I think they were looking for someone who sounded like Robert Johnson."

Johnson had been recorded in hotels in Texas, but Lomax's journey to the Delta was one of the first times archivists ventured out to record such musicians in the surroundings that produced them.

Once at Waters' shack, Lomax and Work set up their 300-pound recording machine on Muddy's front porch, running a power cord from the car because sharecroppers' shacks had no electricity.

With Muddy inside the house, they recorded him playing "Country Blues," a reworking of a song he learned from Son House called "Walkin' Blues."

In it, Muddy sings woefully of waking up one morning and finding "my little baby gone." While his voice reeks of the blues, the bottleneck on his little finger slides up and down the strings with a stinging zip, especially on the solo break.

When Lomax asks him about the song's inspiration, Muddy says, "Well, I had been mistreated by a girl and that run in my mind to sing this."

Muddy also played an original called "I Be's Troubled," a song he would later record in Chicago as "I Can't Be Satisfied." On the second song, his furious slide guitar work is even more pronounced, as are his vocals.

"Well, I never been satisfied," he wails on the first part of the chorus before his voice swan dives in pitch for a deep, bellowing cry: "I just can't keep from crying."

Asked where he first heard that song, Muddy replies: "I made that up my own self. That's a song I made up."

Decades later, that first session and others recorded in a second session in 1942 would be released as "Muddy Waters: The Complete Plantation Recordings."

In an interview for new liner notes Lomax, who died in 2002, compared Muddy's sound with that of Robert Johnson.

"Of course, I knew Robert Johnson's work, had studied all his commercial recordings," Lomax says. "But Muddy was clearly a major blues figure who had taken the blues to a new level, (which) was the best of blues."

After the initial session, Lomax wrote to Muddy that he would receive $20 when the songs were released on a Library of Congress recording. A year and a half later, they were, and when Muddy received a copy of the record, he immediately put it on the jukebox of a nearby cafe.

Hearing his music on a jukebox, Muddy realized his songs were just as good as the others on the same machine.

"I can do it," he said. "I can do it."

"That's the beginning," Gordon says. "It's the beginning of the recognition of the African-American voice, especially the indigenous culture.

"And it's a validation of his talent, the realization that he can be one of those guys on the jukebox."

By 1940, Muddy Waters had ventured to St. Louis but returned to life working on Stovall Plantation. By 1943, he had tired of making 221U2 cents an hour for driving a tractor while others, including white workers, were making 271U2 cents an hour.

He asked for a raise that would split the difference, to 25 cents an hour. He was turned down.

Two days later, Muddy packed a suitcase, took his Sears Silvertone guitar and boarded a train in Clarksdale.

He was on a one-way trip to Chicago.

By the time he returned to Stovall years later, Muddy Waters would be a household name, and the blues would be a music heard around the world.

Bill Dean can be reached at bill.dean@theledger.com or 863-802-7527.

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